Voyager 1 Lives Another Day… So Should Your Battery Pack
Everyone loves the story of the two Voyager interstellar probes, predictably named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in the summer of 1977 when Jimmy Carter was the new guy in the White House, and the Atari 2600 kickstarted the multi-billion dollar video game revolution.
While the Voyagers had to do without the Atari 2600's wood grain aesthetic, they turned out to have something more than what meets the eye — a software-defined architecture, which probably saved Voyager 1’s life.
The venerable Voyager 1 had been misbehaving since November 2023, and NASA’s announcement filled scientists and space geeks with dread and fear. How would it be possible to conduct a physical repair of humanity’s most distant possession at 24 billion kilometers from Earth?
After all, it takes 45 hours at light speed to send a message and receive a response from that distance. Imagine clicking a button on Wednesday at lunchtime and waiting until Friday morning to see if something happens. (And we think dial-ups are unbearable!)
Despite the challenging telemetry situation, a NASA engineer had a lightbulb moment as they pored over the gibberish data Voyager 1 sent back to Earth. They concluded that one of the memory chips must have failed because of wear, a cosmic particle, or who-knows-what. (Hint: not aliens.)
NASA got to work and wrote a new version of the Voyager software to perform the same functions without requiring that one failed chip. Then, they uploaded it to the limping probe with a massive parabolic antenna in Australia. And… it worked! NASA announced in late April that the spacecraft is again blissfully beaming scientific data home without a glitch.
Let’s consider a battery pack powering a space probe, satellite, or more earthly application like a weather station, remote cell tower, or forklift. All these batteries consist of many cells, with lithium, nickel, sodium, or other internal chemistries.
Like Voyager 1’s memory chip, individual cells fail. In fact, electrochemical cells fail much earlier and more frequently than semiconductors, and these failures are just as detrimental to the system’s and equipment’s normal operations.
And like Voyager 1’s repair, we can address hardware issues with software solutions.
Software-defined batteries (SDBs) not only have the capability to self-analyze and send telemetry to the home base. Those built on Tanktwo’s Dycromax architecture can also rewire remotely and on the fly without anyone physically touching the battery pack.
So, instead of having a dying cell take down a module or an entire battery pack, the system isolates the offending cell(s). Then, the high-cost, mission-critical application continues to operate without missing a beat.
While Voyager 1 required a software update to get back on its little spacecraft feet, an SDB is largely self-correcting without uploading any new code or configuration script. As time goes by, battery science improves, and new algorithms help us better optimize existing chemistries, it is possible and often desirable to push new firmware — which we can also perform remotely and to every SDB simultaneously.
Even though our earthly applications like cell towers, medical equipment, weather stations, or forklifts aren’t 24 billion kilometers away from the operators, it’s still more cost-effective (and often safer) to perform maintenance remotely instead of sending a technician up a mountain or venture into an Alaskan logging road.
The world of software-defined applications is here. The technology will profoundly impact how we manage, maintain, and upgrade hardware. For example, Tesla used a software update to avoid a costly recall.
Wonder how SDBs fit into your product and technology roadmap? Get in touch to see how we can help.
